33

64

32.9

28.9

31.1

.357

.376

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

35

61

36.4

33.1

33.7

.390

.372

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

Three games against the Brewers, zero runs scored. But on the positive side, it wasn't four games.

3

39

56

41.3

42.7

41.4

.444

.464

0.0%

0.0%

0.1%

0.1%

0.0%

Stop hugging Alex Rios unless you really mean he's been traded to a contender. Even if you have deep affection for him, just shoot him a smile until this whole thing blows over.

4

45

50

46.5

41.1

42.1

.465

.485

0.5%

0.3%

0.8%

-0.4%

0.2%

Jeremy Guthrie gave up five runs in six innings and wins. James Shields allowed three runs in seven innings and loses. The moral of the story: wins/losses are a function of run support, which is a function of how much the grand wizard in the center field fountain likes you.

5

43

51

44.2

42.6

42.3

.467

.447

0.8%

0.6%

1.4%

0.7%

0.3%

Business idea: paint Matt Harvey's piercing dreamy eyes in the outfield so he can be with us always.

Right...how can the Yankees and Angels have a lower actual, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd order winning percentage than the Indians but still be placed higher on the Hit list. I thought the hit list factor was just the average of those four percentages?

Additionally to what everyone else s saying (these standings are nonsense right now), the "adjusted" HLF just makes the thing even more ridiculous. Seven out of the top 9 teams are AL teams because of a relatively arbitrary .020 bump to the AL's HLF and .020 debit for the NL's HLF (which seems like a double dip penalty, but that's a whole other issue)? Are you saying you really think the Yankees are a better team than, say, the Braves at this point? Or the Pirates? That's just silly.

The 0.040 change (0.02+ for AL and 0.02- for NL) is actually fairly well documented every season. They've found that the AL teams are clearly more dominant (possibly because of the DH position) than the NL teams based on interleague records over the course of the last however many (I believe 5) seasons.

We changed the HLF/AHLF this morning to remove the PECOTA weight for early-season results, so you should see a reordering of the Hit List that'll persist for the rest of the season.

I know there have been some other concerns about the adjusted hit list factor, in terms of the league quality adjustment. To illustrate, in interleague play in 2013, the AL has gone .532 to the NL's .468. It's a rather dramatic difference, and one that has persisted over time (you get very similar results looking at it from 2010 through 2013), so it's not a sampling issue. The AL has consistently been significantly better than the NL in head-to-head competition. We use a somewhat different method of figuring the league quality adjustment for the Hit List, that's substantially lower than what we see in the raw interleague results, actually.